The Faces of Carnival in Anita Desai's In Custody

PART ONE. — DISPLACEMENT, CREOLIZATION, AND TARGETED AUDIENCEI. Global reader empowerment and author/ization1 - Encoding and decoding : inherited knowledges and naturalized axiologies2 - Authenticity and legitimationII. The decline and fall of empires : the politics of language1 - Mythical and literary paradigms : a stereoscopic representation2 - The 'emergence of the interstices'III. Literary carnival : collocating within culture-specific and cross-cultural frameworks1 - Carnivalesque double-voicing2 - The centripetal and the centrifugalPART TWO. — PURITY AND POLLUTIONI. Myth and food, a window on cosmology1 - Identity-constructing configurations2 - Paradigms of transgressionII. The poetics and politics of scatology, saturation, and reception1 - The grotesque body of carnival2 - From death to diarrhoeaIII. From carnivore to cannibal1 - Conflating diners and dinners2 - Staging paradigms of predationPART THREE. — REALISM, ROMANCE, AND SATIREI. Transmogrification, transtextuality, and transculturalism1 - The engine of allegory2 - Clowning and genre3 - In/validating tragedy4 - MenippeaII. Figure and memory1 - In my beginning is my end. In succession, Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended2 - The idyllic and the demonicIII. Mimicry and mélange1 - Refiguring, configuring and reconfiguring2 - Parodia3 - Art as phenomenonRefracting the meanings stories make and unmakeBibliography